September 24
A feeling that we grasp clearly and distinctly ceases to be something we merely undergo. See things from the standpoint of eternity.
Ethics (freely rendered)
Listening mode
A feeling that we grasp clearly and distinctly ceases to be something we merely undergo. See things from the standpoint of eternity.
At night a single sentence you said during the day can fill the whole room. You hear it again and again, a little clumsier each time. In the morning it is once more one sentence among many, and you wonder how much power it had over you.
It is tempting to take the morning view as the right one. But distance alone makes nothing clearer. It only makes things look smaller, and that too is a way of not looking. If you dismiss a slight with the thought that in a hundred years no one will care, you have not understood it. You have only turned the volume down.
It gets more precise only when you ask where the sentence got its weight. Perhaps it had nothing to do with its wording, but with the person it was meant for, and with how much their judgement matters to you. That is no nocturnal exaggeration. It holds in daylight too.
In the evening you meet them again, and the sentence comes back to you. It is no larger than it was in the night and no smaller than it was in the morning. Now you know what it referred to.
